... Severe drought has resulted in widespread tree die‐off events in forests and woodlands globally and is forecast to become more frequent in coming decades. Tree mortality is a complex process influenced by climate, soils, characteristics of individual trees, interactions between trees, and the dynamics of pests and pathogens. The role of stand structure and stand density in mediating the resistance ...

... Cities are increasingly focused on expanding tree canopy cover as a means to improve the urban environment by, for example, reducing heat island effects, promoting better air quality, and protecting local habitat. The majority of efforts to expand canopy cover focus on planting street trees or on planting native tree species and removing nonnatives in natural areas through reforestation. Yet many ...

... Increasing tree density that followed fire exclusion after the 1880s in the southwestern United States may have also altered nutrient cycles and led to a carbon (C) sink that constitutes a significant component of the U.S. C budget. Yet, empirical data quantifying century‐scale changes in C or nutrients due to fire exclusion are rare. We used tree‐ring reconstructions of stand structure from five ...

... Dynamic Vegetation Models (DVMs) are designed to be suitable for simulating forest succession and species range dynamics under current and future conditions based on mathematical representations of the three key processes regeneration, growth, and mortality. However, mortality formulations in DVMs are typically coarse and often lack an empirical basis, which increases the uncertainty of projection ...

... This study examines spatially variable stand structure and fire–climate relationships at a low elevation forest–grassland ecotone in west central British Columbia, Canada. Fire history reconstructions were based on samples from 92 fire‐scarred trees and stand demography from 27 plots collected over an area of about 7 km². We documented historical chronologies of widespread fires and localized gras ...

... Understanding the anthropogenic and natural controls that affect the patterns, distribution, and dynamics of terrestrial carbon is crucial to meeting climate change mitigation objectives. We assessed the human and natural controls over aboveground tree biomass density in African dry tropical forests, using Zambia's first nationwide forest inventory. We identified predictors that best explain the v ...

... Changes in the frequency, duration, and severity of climate extremes are forecast to occur under global climate change. The impacts of climate extremes on forest productivity and health remain difficult to predict due to potential interactions with disturbance events and forest dynamics—changes in forest stand composition, density, size and age structure over time. Such interactions may lead to no ...

... In terms of adult tree mortality, harvesting is the most prevalent disturbance in northeastern United States forests. Previous studies have demonstrated that stand structure and tree species composition are important predictors of harvest. We extend this work to investigate how social factors further influence harvest regimes. By coupling the Forest Inventory and Analysis database to U.S. Census a ...

... Escalating wildfire in subalpine forests with stand‐replacing fire regimes is increasing the extent of early‐seral forests throughout the western USA. Post‐fire succession generates the fuel for future fires, but little is known about fuel loads and their variability in young post‐fire stands. We sampled fuel profiles in 24‐year‐old post‐fire lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia) stands ( ...

... Fire frequency in low‐elevation coniferous forests in western North America has greatly declined since the late 1800s. In many areas, this has increased tree density and the proportion of shade‐tolerant species, reduced resource availability, and increased forest susceptibility to forest insect pests and high‐severity wildfire. In response, treatments are often implemented with the goal of increas ...

... The contribution of working forests to tropical conservation and development depends upon the maintenance of ecological integrity under ongoing land use. Assessment of ecological integrity requires an understanding of the structure, composition, and function and major drivers that govern their variability. Working forests in tropical river floodplains provide many goods and services, yet the data ...

... Much of our understanding of natural forest dynamics in the temperate region of Europe is based on observational studies in old‐growth remnants that have emphasized small‐scale gap dynamics and equilibrium stand structure and composition. Relatively little attention has been given to the role of infrequent disturbance events in forest dynamics. In this study, we analyzed dendroecological data from ...

... Widespread fire suppression and thinning have altered the structure and composition of many forests in the western United States, making them more susceptible to the synergy of large‐scale drought and fire events. We examine how these changes affect carbon storage and stability compared to historic fire‐adapted conditions. We modeled carbon dynamics under possible drought and fire conditions over ...

... We developed a new climate‐sensitive vegetation state‐and‐transition simulation model (CV‐STSM) to simulate future vegetation at a fine spatial grain commensurate with the scales of human land‐use decisions, and under the joint influences of changing climate, site productivity, and disturbance. CV‐STSM integrates outputs from four different modeling systems. Successional changes in tree species co ...

... Matrix population models have long been used to examine and predict the fate of threatened populations. However, the majority of these efforts concentrate on long‐term equilibrium dynamics of linear systems and their underlying assumptions and, therefore, omit the analysis of transience. Since management decisions are typically concerned with the short term (<100 years), asymptotic analyses could ...

... Logging is a larger cause of adult tree mortality in northeastern U.S. forests than all other causes of mortality combined. We used Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data to develop statistical models to quantify three different aspects of aggregate regional forest harvest regimes: (1) the annual probability that a plot is logged, as a function of total aboveground tree biomass, (2) the fraction ...

... In the context of the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions caused by deforestation and forest degradation (the REDD+ program), optical very high resolution (VHR) satellite images provide an opportunity to characterize forest canopy structure and to quantify aboveground biomass (AGB) at less expense than methods based on airborne remote sensing data. Among the methods for processing these VHR imag ...

... Demand for forest bioenergy fuel is increasing in the northern forest region of eastern North America and beyond, but ecological impacts, particularly on habitat, of bioenergy harvesting remain poorly explored in the peer‐reviewed literature. Here, we evaluated the impacts of bioenergy harvests on stand structure, including several characteristics considered important for biodiversity and habitat ...